To understand the nature of this chapter, it is necessary to recur to
the nature of this book. The argument which is meant to be the backbone
of the book is of the kind called the reductio ad absurdum. It suggests
that the results of assuming the rationalist thesis are more irrational
than ours; but to prove it we must assume that thesis. Thus in the first
section I often treated man as merely an animal, to show that the effect
was more impossible than if he were treated as an angel. In the sense in
which it was necessary to treat man merely as an animal, it is necessary
to treat Christ merely as a man. I have to suspend my own beliefs, which
are much more positive; and assume this limitation even in order to remove
it. I must try to imagine what would happen to a man who did really read
the story of Christ as the story of a man; and even of a man of whom he
had never heard before. And I wish to point out that a really impartial
reading of that kind would lead, if not immediately to belief, at least
to a bewilderment of which there is really no solution except in belief.
In this chapter, for this reason, I shall bring in nothing of the spirit
of my own creed; I shall exclude the very style of diction, and even of
lettering, which I should think fitting in speaking in my own person. I
am speaking as an imaginary heathen human being, honestly, staring at the
Gospel story for the first time.

Now it is not at all easy to regard the New Testament as a New Testament.
It is not at all easy to realise the good news as new. Both for good and
evil familiarity fills us with assumptions and associations; and no man
of our civilisation, whatever he thinks of our religion, can really read
the thing as if he had never heard of it before. Of course it is in any
case utterly unhistorical to talk as if the New Testament were a neatly
bound book that had fallen from heaven. It is simply the selection made
by the authority of the Church from a mass of early Christian literature.
But apart from any such question there is a psychological difficulty in
feeling the New Testament as new. There is a psychological difficulty in
seeing those well-known words simply as they stand and without going beyond
what they intrinsically stand for. And this difficulty must indeed be very
great; for the result of it is very curious. The result of it is that most
modern critics and most current criticism, even popular criticism, makes
a comment that is the exact reverse of the truth. It is so completely the
reverse of the truth that one could almost suspect that they had never
read the New Testament at all.

We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never
to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most
merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this
human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical
terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This is, I venture to
repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth is that it is the
image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful.
It is the image of Christ in the Gospels that is a good many other things
as well. The figure in the Gospels does indeed utter in words of almost
heart-breaking beauty his pity for our broken hearts. But they are very
far from being the only sort of words that he utters. Nevertheless they
are almost the only kind of words that the Church in its popular imagery
ever represents him as uttering. That popular imagery is inspired by a
perfectly sound popular instinct. The mass of the poor are broken, and
the mass of the people are poor, and for the mass of mankind the main thing
is to carry the conviction of the incredible compassion of God. But nobody
with his eyes open can doubt that it is chiefly this idea of compassion
that the popular machinery of the Church does seek to carry. The popular
imagery carries a great deal to excess the sentiment of 'Gentle Jesus,
meek and mild.' It is the first thing that the outsider feels and criticises
in a Pieta or a shrine of the Sacred Heart. As I say, while the art may
be insufficient, I am not sure that the instinct is
unsound. In any case there is something appalling, something that makes
the blood run cold, in the idea of having a statue of Christ in wrath.
There is something insupportable even to the imagination in the idea of
turning the corner of a street or coming out into the spaces of a marketplace,
to meet the petrifying petrifaction of that figure as it turned upon a
generation of vipers, or that face as it looked at the face of a hypocrite.
The Church can reasonably be justified therefore if she turns the most
merciful face or aspect towards men; but it is certainly the
most merciful aspect that she does turn. And the point is here that
it is very much more specially and exclusively merciful than any impression
that could be formed by a man merely reading the New Testament for the
first time. A man simply taking the words of the story as they stand would
form quite another impression; an impression full of mystery and possibly
of inconsistency; but certainly not merely an impression of mildness. It
would be intensely interesting; but part of the interest would consist
in its leaving a good deal to be guessed at or explained. It is full of
sudden gestures evidently significant except that we hardly know what they
signify, of enigmatic silences; of ironical replies. The outbreaks of wrath,
like storms above our atmosphere, do not seem to break out exactly where
we should expect them, but to follow some higher weather-chart of their
own. The Peter whom popular Church teaching presents is very rightly the
Peter to whom Christ said in forgiveness, 'Feed my lambs.' He is not the
Peter upon whom Christ turned as if he were the devil, crying in that obscure
wrath, 'Get thee behind me, Satan.' Christ lamented with nothing
but love and pity over Jerusalem which was to murder him. We do not know
what strange spiritual atmosphere or spiritual insight led him to sink
Bethsaida lower in the pit than Sodom. I am putting aside for the moment
all questions of doctrinal inferences or expositions, orthodox or otherwise;
I am simply imagining the effect on a man's mind if he did really do what
these critics are always talking
about doing; if he did really read the New Testament without reference
to orthodoxy and even without reference to doctrine. He would find a number
of things which fit in far less with the current unorthodoxy than they
do with the current orthodoxy. He would find, for instance, that if there
are any descriptions that deserved to be called realistic, they are precisely
the descriptions of the supernatural. If there is one aspect of the New
Testament Jesus in which he may be said to present himself eminently as
a practical person, it is in the aspect of an exorcist. There is nothing
meek and mild, there is nothing even in the ordinary sense mystical, about
the tone of the voice that says 'Hold thy peace and come out of him.' It
is much more like the tone of a very business-like lion-tamer or a strong-minded
doctor dealing with a homicidal maniac. But this is only a side issue for
the sake of illustration; I am not now raising these controversies; but
considering the case of the imaginary man from the moon to whom the New
Testament is new.

Now the first thing to note is that if we take it merely as a human
story, it is in some ways a very strange story. I do not refer here to
its tremendous and tragic culmination or to any implications involving
triumph in that tragedy. I do not refer to what is commonly called the
miraculous element; for on that point philosophies vary and modern philosophies
very decidedly waver. Indeed the educated Englishman of to-day may be said
to have passed from an old fashion, in which he would not believe in any
miracles unless they were ancient, and adopted a new fashion in which he
will not believe in any miracles unless they are modern. He used to hold
that miraculous cures stopped with the first Christians and is now inclined
to suspect that they began with the first Christian Scientists. But I refer
here rather specially to unmiraculous and even to unnoticed and inconspicuous
parts of the story. There are a great many things about it which nobody
would have invented, for they are things that nobody has ever made any
particular use of; things which if they were remarked at all have remained
rather as puzzles. For
instance, there is that long stretch of silence in the life of Christ
up to the age of thirty. It is of all silences the most immense and imaginatively
impressive. But it is not the sort of thing that anybody is particularly
likely to invent in order to prove something; and no body so far as I know
has ever tried to prove anything in particular from it. It is impressive,
but it is only impressive as a fact; there is nothing particularly popular
or obvious about it as a fable. The ordinary trend of hero-worship and
myth-making is much more likely to say the precise opposite. It is much
more likely to say (as I believe some of the gospels rejected by the
Church do say) that Jesus displayed a divine precocity and began his mission
at a miraculously early age. And there is indeed something strange in the
thought that he who of all humanity needed least preparation seems to have
had most. Whether it was some mode of the divine humility, or some truth
of which we see the shadow of the longer domestic tutelage of the higher
creatures of the earth. I do not propose to speculate; I mention it simply
as an example of the sort of thing that does in any case give rise to speculations,
quite apart from recognised religious speculations. Now the whole story
is full of these things. It is not by any means, as baldly presented in
print, a story that it is easy to get to the bottom of. It is anything
but what these people talk of as a simple Gospel. Relatively speaking,
it is the Gospel that has the mysticism and the Church that has the rationalism.
As I should put it, of course, it is the Gospel that is the riddle and
the Church that is the answer. But whatever be the answer, the Gospel as
it stands is almost a book of riddles.

First, a man reading the Gospel sayings would not find platitudes. If
he had read even in the most respectful spirit the majority of ancient
philosophers and of modern moralists, he would appreciate the unique importance
of saying that he did not find platitudes. It is more than can be said
even of Plato. It is much more than can be said of Epictetus or Seneca
or Marcus Aurelius or Apollonius of Tyana. And it is immeasurably more
than can be said of most of the agnostic moralists and the preachers of
the ethical societies; with their songs of service and
their religion of brotherhood. The morality of most moralists ancient
and modern, has been one solid and polished cataract of platitudes flowing
for ever and ever. That would certainly not be the impression of the imaginary
independent outsider studying the New Testament. He would be conscious
of nothing so commonplace and in a sense of nothing so continuous as that
stream. He would find a number of strange claims that might sound like
the claim to be the brother of the sun and moon; a number of very startling
pieces of advice; a number of stunning rebukes; a number of strangely beautiful
stories. He would see some very gigantesque figures of speech about the
impossibility of threading a needle with a camel or the possibility of
throwing a mountain into the sea. He would see a number of very daring
simplifications of the difficulties of life; like the advice to shine upon
everybody indifferently as does the sunshine or not to worry about the
future any more than the birds. He would find on the other hand some passages
of almost impenetrable darkness, so far as he is concerned, such as the
moral of the parable of the Unjust Steward. Some of these things might
strike him as fables and some as truths; but none as truisms. For instance,
he would not find the ordinary platitudes in favour of peace. He would
find several paradoxes in favour of peace. He would find several ideals
of non-resistance, which taken as they stand would be rather too pacific
for any pacifist. He would be told in one passage to treat a robber not
with passive resistance, but rather with positive and enthusiastic encouragement,
if the terms be taken literally; heaping up gifts upon the man who had
stolen goods. But he would not find a word of all that obvious rhetoric
against war which has filled countless books and odes and orations; not
a word about the wickedness of war, the wastefulness of war, the appalling
scale of the slaughter in war and all the rest of the familiar frenzy;
indeed not a word about war at all. There is nothing that throws any particular
light on Christ's attitude towards organised warfare, except that he seems
to have been rather fond of Roman soldiers. Indeed it is another perplexity,
speaking from the same external and human stand point, that he seems to
have got on much better with Romans than he did with Jews. But the question
here is a certain tone to be appreciated by merely reading a certain text;
and we might give any number of instances of it.

The statement that the meek shall inherit the earth is very far from
being a meek statement. I mean it is not meek in the ordinary sense of
mild and moderate and inoffensive. To justify it, it would be necessary
to go very deep into history and anticipate things undreamed of then and
by many unrealised even now; such as the way in which the mystical monks
reclaimed the lands which the practical kings had lost. If it was a truth
at all, it was because it was a prophecy. But certainly it was not a truth
in the sense of a truism. The blessing upon the meek would seem to be a
very violent statement; in the sense of doing violence to reason and probability.
And with this we come to another important stage in the speculation. As
a prophecy it really was fulfilled; but it was only fulfilled long afterwards.
The monasteries were the most practical and prosperous estates and experiments
in reconstruction after the barbaric deluge; the meek did really inherit
the earth. But nobody could have known anything of the sort at the time--
unless indeed there was one who knew. Something of the same thing may be
said about the incident of Martha and Mary; which has been interpreted
in retrospect and from the inside by the mystics of the Christian contemplative
life. But it was not at all an obvious view of it; and most moralists,
ancient and modern, could be trusted to make a rush for the obvious. What
torrents of effortless eloquence would have flowed from them to swell any
slight superiority on the part of Martha; what splendid sermons about the
Joy of Service and the Gospel of Work and the World Left Better Than We
Found It, and generally all the ten thousand platitudes that can be uttered
in favour of taking trouble--by people who need take no trouble to utter
them. If in Mary the mystic and child of love Christ was guarding the seed
of something more subtle, who was likely to understand it at the time?
Nobody else could have seen Clare and Catherine and Teresa shining above
the little roof at Bethany. It is so in another way with that magnificent
menace about bringing into the world a sword to sunder and divide. Nobody
could have guessed then either how it could be fulfilled or how it could
be justified. Indeed some freethinkers are still so simple as to fall into
the trap and be shocked at a phrase so deliberately defiant. They actually
complain of the paradox for not being a platitude.

But the point here is that if we could read the Gospel reports as things
as new as newspaper reports, they would puzzle us and perhaps terrify us
much more than the same things as developed by historical Christianity.
For instance, Christ after a clear allusion to the eunuchs of eastern courts,
said there would be eunuchs of the kingdom of heaven. If this does not
mean the voluntary enthusiasm of virginity, it could only be made to mean
something much more unnatural or uncouth. It is the historical religion
that humanises it for us by experience of Franciscans or of Sisters of
Mercy. The mere statement standing by itself might very well suggest a
rather dehumanised atmosphere; the sinister and inhuman silence of the
Asiatic harem and divan. This is but one instance out of scores; but the
moral is that the Christ of the Gospel might actually seem more strange
and terrible than the Christ of the Church.

I am dwelling on the dark or dazzling or defiant or mysterious side
of the Gospel words, not because they had not obviously a more obvious
and popular side, but because this is the answer to a common criticism
on a vital point. The freethinker frequently says that Jesus of Nazareth
was a man of his time, even if he was in advance of his time; and that
we cannot accept his ethics as final for humanity. The freethinker then
goes on to criticise his ethics, saying plausibly enough that men cannot
turn the other cheek, or that they must take thought for the morrow, or
that the self-denial is too ascetic or the monogamy too severe. But the
Zealots and the Legionaries did not turn the other cheek any more than
we do, if so much. The Jewish traders and Roman tax-gatherers took thought
for the morrow as much as we, if not more. We cannot pretend to be abandoning
the morality of the past for one more suited to the present. It is certainly
not the morality of another age, but it might be of another world.

In short, we can say that these ideals are impossible in themselves.
Exactly what we cannot say is that they are impossible for us. They are
rather notably marked by a mysticism which, if it be a sort of madness,
would always have struck the same sort of people as mad. Take, for instance,
the case of marriage and the relations of the sexes. It might very well
have been true that a Galilean teacher taught things natural to a Galilean
environment; but it is not. It might rationally be expected that a man
in the time of Tiberius would have advanced a view conditioned by
the time of Tiberius; but he did not. What he advanced was something
quite different; something very difficult; but something no more difficult
now than it was then. When, for instance, Mahomet made his polygamous compromise
we may reasonably say that it was conditioned by a polygamous society.
When he allowed a man four wives he was really doing something suited to
the circumstances, which might have been less suited to other circumstances.
Nobody will pretend that the four wives were like the four winds, something
seemingly a part of the order of nature; nobody will say that the figure
four was written for ever in stars upon the sky But neither will anyone
say that the figure four is an inconceivable ideal; that it is beyond the
power of the mind of man to count up to four; or to count the number of
his wives and see whether it amounts to four. It is a practical compromise
carrying with it the character of a particular society. If Mahomet had
been born in Acton in the nineteenth century, we may well doubt whether
he would instantly have filled that suburb with harems of four wives apiece.
As he was born in Arabia in the sixth century, he did in his conjugal arrangements
suggest the conditions of Arabia in the sixth century. But Christ in his
view of marriage does not in the least suggest the conditions of Palestine
of the first century. He does not suggest anything at all, except the sacramental
view of marriage as developed long afterwards by the Catholic Church. It
was quite as difficult for people then as for people now. It
was much more puzzling to people then than to people now. Jews and
Romans and Greeks did not believe, and did not even understand enough to
disbelieve, the mystical idea that the man and the woman had become one
sacramental substance. We may think it an incredible or impossible ideal;
but we cannot think it any more incredible or impossible than they would
have thought it. In other words, whatever else is true, it is not true
that the controversy has been altered by time. Whatever else is true, it
is emphatically not true that the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth were suitable
to his time, but are no longer suitable to our time. Exactly how suitable
they we to his time is perhaps suggested in the end of his story.

The same truth might be stated in another way by saying that if the
story be regarded as merely human and historical, it is extraordinary how
very little there is in the recorded words of Christ that ties him at all
to his own time. I do not mean the details of a period, which even a man
of the period knows to be passing. I mean the fundamentals which even the
wisest man often vaguely assumes to be eternal. For instance, Aristotle
was perhaps the wisest and most wide-minded man who ever lived. He founded
himself entirely upon fundamentals, which have been generally found to
remain rational and solid through all social and historical changes. Still,
he lived in a world in which it was thought as natural to have slaves as
to have children. And therefore he did permit himself a serious recognition
of a difference between slaves and free men. Christ as much as Aristotle
lived in a world that took slavery for granted. He did not particularly
denounce slavery. He started a movement that could
exist in a world with slavery. But he started a movement that could
exist in a world without slavery. He never used a phrase that made his
philosophy depend even upon the very existence of the social order in which
he lived. He spoke as one conscious that everything was ephemeral, including
the things that Aristotle thought eternal. By that time the Roman Empire
had come to be merely the orbis terrarum, another name for the world. But
he never made his morality dependent on the existence of the Roman Empire
or even on the existence of the world.
'Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.'

The truth is that when critics have spoken of the local limitations
of the Galilean, it has always been a case of the local limitations of
the critics. He did undoubtedly believe in certain things that one particular
modern sect of materialists do not believe. But they were not things particularly
peculiar to his time. It would be nearer the truth to say that the denial
of them is quite peculiar to our time. Doubtless it would be nearer still
to the truth to say merely that a certain solemn social importance, in
the minority disbelieving them, is peculiar to our time. He believed, for
instance, in evil spirits or in the psychic healing of bodily ills; but
not because he was a Galilean born under Augustus. It is absurd to say
that a man believed things because he was a Galilean under Augustus when
he might have believed the same things if he had been an Egyptian under
Tutenkamen or an Indian under Gengis Khan. But with this general question
of the philosophy of diabolism or of divine miracles I deal elsewhere.
It is enough to say that the materialists have to prove the impossibility
of miracles against the testimony of all mankind, not against the prejudices
of provincials in North Palestine under the first Roman Emperors. What
they have to prove, for the present argument, is the presence in the Gospels
of those particular prejudices of those particular provincials. And, humanly
speaking, it is astonishing how little they can produce even to make a
beginning of proving it.

So it is in this case of the sacrament of marriage. We may not believe
in sacraments, as we may not believe in spirits, but it is quite clear
that Christ believed in this sacrament in his own way and not in any current
or contemporary way. He certainly did not get his argument against divorce
from the Mosaic law or the Roman law or the habits of the Palestinian people.
It would appear to his critics then exactly what it appears to his critics
now; an arbitrary and transcendental dogma coming from nowhere save in
the sense that it came from him. I am not at all concerned here to defend
that dogma; the point here is that it is just as easy to defend it now
as it was to defend it then. It is an ideal altogether outside time; difficult
at any period; impossible at no period. In other words, if anyone says
it is what might be expected of a man walking about in that place at that
period, we can quite fairly answer that it is much more like what might
be the mysterious utterance of a being beyond man, if
he walked alive among men.

I maintain therefore that a man reading the New Testament frankly and
freshly would not get the impression of what is now often meant by a human
Christ. The merely human Christ is a made-up figure, a piece of artificial
selection, like the merely evolutionary man. Moreover there have been too
many of these human Christs found in the same story, just as there have
been too many keys to mythology found in the same stories. Three or four
separate schools of rationalism have worked over the ground and produced
three or four equally rational explanations of his life. The first rational
explanation of his life was that he never lived. And this in turn gave
an opportunity for three or four different explanations, as that he was
a sun-myth or a corn-myth, or any other kind of myth that is also a monomania.
Then the idea that he was a divine being who did not exist gave place to
the idea that he was a human being who did exist. In my youth it vas the
fashion to say that he was merely an ethical
teacher in the manner of the Essenes, who had apparently nothing very
much to say that Hillel or a hundred other Jews might not have said; as
that it is a kindly thing to be kind and an assistance to purification
to be pure. Then somebody said he was a madman with a Messianic delusion.
Then others said he was indeed an original teacher because he cared about
nothing but Socialism; or (as others said) about nothing but Pacifism.
Then a more grimly scientific character appeared who said that Jesus would
never have been heard of at all except for his prophecies of the end of
the world. He was important merely as a Millenarian like Dr. Cumming; and
created a provincial scare by announcing the exact date of the crack of
doom. Among other variants on the same theme was the theory that he was
a spiritual healer and nothing else; a view implied by Christian Science,
which has really to expound a Christianity without the Crucifixion in order
to explain the curing of Peter's wife's mother or the daughter of a centurion.
There is another theory that concentrates entirely on the business of diabolism
and what it would
call the contemporary superstition about demoniacs, as if Christ, like
a young deacon taking his first orders, had got as far as exorcism and
never got any further. Now, each of these explanations in itself seems
to me singularly inadequate; but taken together they do suggest something
of the very mystery which they miss. There must surely have been something
not only mysterious but many-sided about Christ if so many smaller Christs
can be carved out of him. If the Christian Scientist is satisfied with
him as a spiritual healer and the Christian Socialist is
satisfied with him as a social reformer, so satisfied that they do
not even expect him to be anything else, it looks as if he really covered
rather more ground than they could be expected to expect. And it does seem
to suggest that there might be more than they fancy in these other mysterious
attributes of casting out devils or prophesying doom.

Above all, would not such a new reader of the New Testament stumble
over something that would startle him much more than it startles us? I
have here more than once attempted the rather impossible task of reversing
time and the historic method; and in fancy looking forward to the facts,
instead of backward through the memories. So I have imagined the monster
that man might have seemed at first to the mere nature around him. We should
have a worse shock if we really imagined the nature of Christ named for
the first time. What should we feel at the first whisper of a certain suggestion
about a certain man? Certainly it is not for us to blame anybody who should
find that first wild whisper merely impious and insane. On the contrary,
stumbling on that rock of scandal is the first step. Stark staring incredulity
is a far more loyal tribute to that truth than a modernist metaphysic that
would make it out merely a matter of degree. It were better to rend our
robes with a great cry against blasphemy, like Caiaphas in the judgement,
or to lay hold of the man as a maniac possessed of devils like the kinsmen
and the crowd, rather
than to stand stupidly debating fine shades of pantheism in the presence
of so catastrophic a claim. There is more of the wisdom that is one with
surprise in any simple person, full of the sensitiveness of simplicity,
who should expect the grass to wither and the birds to drop dead out of
the air, when a strolling carpenter's apprentice said calmly and almost
carelessly, like one looking over his shoulder: 'Before Abraham was, I
am.'